Medical evaluations are traditionally made through a trained provider doing a single or a few assessments. Typically these assessments are performed in a hospital or medical practitioner's office. These assessments are often incomplete, leading to missed disease detection in the early stages when treatment is more effective. This is due in part to assessments being made at some snapshot in a continuum of a patient's individual physiological rhythm, such as those of a patient's day (diurnal rhythms). These assessments may also fail due to being made during some particular situation during which the patient's health assessment can vary, such as due to stress caused by being at the practitioner's office.
These problems have been partially addressed through in-home monitoring. A patient can be given a monitoring device, such as a blood pressure cuff, which the patient can use to monitor his or her blood pressure at a particular time or at a consistent physiological state (e.g., in bed after waking up or right after breakfast). While this partial solution appears to address sporadic assessments, data shows that patients often do not remain diligent with home monitoring. Many patients will use a device for a while and then lose interest, only to suffer the negative health consequences. Other patients will use the device sporadically, missing some days, using the device at different times or in different states, and so forth. Still others will fail to use the devices correctly, giving inaccurate results. Even for those patients that use the monitoring device correctly, consistently, and over the long term, this partial solution still fails to monitor medical conditions early, as the monitoring devices are prescribed after a problem already exists. For these reasons, home monitoring when the user is actively required to perform the monitoring often fails to provide accurate medical assessments, especially over the longer term.
Further still, current medical assessments are negatively affected due to the variability intrinsic to the population and thus difficulties inherent in trying to calibrate health assessments to the individual.